“(1) All schools in England, subject to subsection (4), must have a policy that prohibits the use and carrying of certain devices during the school day.

(2) A policy implemented under subsection (1)—

(a) may provide for exemptions from the policy, or for an alternative policy, for sixth form students, in so far as such exemptions or alternative policies do not negatively impact upon the wider policy;

(b) is to be implemented as the relevant school leader considers appropriate.

(3) For the purposes of this section—

‘certain devices’ means mobile phones and other devices which provide similar functionality and whose main purpose is not the support of learning or study;

‘the school day’ includes all time between the start of the first lesson period and the end of the final lesson period.

(4) A policy under this section implemented by a boarding school or residential school may include appropriate guidance for the use of certain devices during other periods which their pupils are on school premises, subject to such policies safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children in accordance with relevant national standards.”—

This new clause would require all schools in England to ban the use of mobile telephones, and other devices with similar functionality, during the school day.

Brought up, and read the First time.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

When I was on the Science and Technology Committee in 2018, I got us to do a report on screen time, social media and children’s mental health. Even then the evidence was alarming; now it is absolutely terrifying. Children are now given smartphones at a very early age. A quarter of the UK’s three and four-year-olds own a smartphone, and by the end of primary school, four out of five kids have one. Over the past decade, there has been an explosion in mental health problems among young people all over the world. Over the exact same period, smartphones and social media became dominant in children’s lives. The growth in anxiety and mental health problems that we are seeing is focused almost entirely in young people, not older people.

There are many channels through which smartphones and social media cause problems for children. First, they displace time in the real world with friends. US data shows that prior to 2012, children spent more than two hours a day with friends. By 2019, that had halved. The proportion of kids feeling lonely and isolated at school has exploded all over the developed world.

The invention of infinite-scroll social media has always reminded me of the famous social science experiment with the bottomless soup bowl. In this experiment, people were invited to eat from a soup bowl that was, unbeknownst to them, invisibly refilled from below. The constant refilling made people eat nearly twice as much as they would with a normal bowl—in some cases absurd amounts of soup.

This is not just about a time sink; there is also the lack of sleep. Kids are tired in school. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has increased massively, and concentration is impaired. This is a feature, not a bug. Apps are designed to be addictive and drip-feed the user dopamine. The same problems are happening not just in the English-speaking world, but in the Nordic nations and all across western Europe. Alternative explanations do not fit the data.

Well-funded efforts by the tech industry to lobby, muddy the water, run interference and sow confusion are unconvincing. These problems are not just a coincidence. There is more and more evidence for a causal link to the disaster hitting our kids. Sapien Labs asked questions about adults’ mental health and combined them into a mental health quotient. They asked the same people when they got a smartphone. Some 28,000 people answered and the results were stark: the earlier a person gets a phone, the worse their adult mental health. That was particularly the case for girls.

On new clause 33, we heard from the hon. Member for Twickenham about the mental health challenge. Data from the OECD’s PISA found that, on average, two thirds of 15-year-olds across OECD countries reporting being distracted using digital devices, including phones, in most or every maths class. In addition, around 60% of pupils got distracted by other pupils using digital devices. That PISA data showed a “tangible” association between the use of digital devices in schools and bad learning outcomes. Students who reported being distracted by peers using devices in some or most maths classes scored significantly lower in maths tests, equivalent to three quarters of a year’s-worth of education. The effects are large.

Other studies have found that the use of smartphones in classrooms leads to students engaging in non-school-related activities—unsurprisingly—which adversely affects recall and comprehension. One study found that it can take students up to 20 minutes to refocus on what they were supposed to be learning after engaging in a non-academic activity.

Many parents know the problems with smartphones, but we face a collective action problem. We worry that our kids will miss out if they are the only ones without them, and we need to solve this problem. Across the country, there has been an explosion of parent-powered campaign groups aiming to fight back, including Smartphone Free Childhood, Safe Screens, and Delay Smartphones, to name but a few. They are doing inspiring work. Mumsnet has started a “Rage Against the Screen” campaign.

The Children’s Commissioner said:

“I honestly think that we will look back in 20 years’ time and be absolutely horrified by what we allowed our children to be exposed to.”

She is right. The shift to a screen-based childhood is having bad effects on young people, from mental health to school readiness to children simply turning up exhausted because they have been on their phone all night. These effects are set to widen gaps in achievement unless something decisive is done.

There are many things that the Government should do, but the first is to implement a proper ban on phones in school. The last Government issued guidance, but that is not enough. Although 90% of schools would say that they have some sort of ban, a survey by Policy Exchange last year found that only one in 10 schools had a full start-to-finish ban, which is the policy that we know works best. Lots of schools are still trying policies where kids have phones on them but are not supposed to have them out. The effect is that kids are distracted, teachers have to tell them to put them away, and all the issues to do with bullying and social media are in play during break times and more.

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful case for banning smartphones in schools, but does he agree that banning smartphones in schools will not, in and of itself, tackle the problems that he has articulated? A recently published study, the first proper nationwide study of its type, shows that banning smartphones in school does not generate any statistical differences in various outcomes, because there is no difference in the amount of time that children are spending on their devices. Although there are strong arguments for banning them in school—and I recognise that there is a strong call for that from parents, teachers and, indeed, many students—a much more holistic approach is needed to tackle the harms that he has outlined.

The hon. Lady makes a thoughtful point. There is a fantastic meta-analysis published by the London School of Economics and the 5Rights Foundation of all the different studies that have been done on this around Europe. The hon. Lady referred to a specific study, which I hope to speak to the authors about. It is a good study, and perfectly sensible, but the issue is that it cannot find anything statistically significant because it looked at only 30 schools, with a sample size of about 1,200 pupils. It does not look at any natural experiments either, so it does not look at schools that are changing their policies.

Where we have good RCT-like evidence, like in the great study in Spain, where they looked at a province that changed its policy wholesale, we can see from those natural experiments the really powerful effects of in-school policies. I agree with the hon. Lady that this is not the only thing that we should do. The study she mentioned was not wrong; it just could never show us the things that people are interested in. Indeed, there is plenty of other evidence out there in these meta-analyses, and from Jonathan Haidt’s website, of really powerful in-school effects.

A study in the US shows that a class time-only rule does not give teachers as much benefit as they might expect. Research from the National Education Association found that 73% of teachers in schools that allow phone use between classes find that phones are disruptive during classes. The same is true here. The Department for Education’s national behaviour survey, published in April 2024, found that 35% of secondary school teachers reported mobile phones being used during lessons without permission. The problem is more pronounced for older children, unsurprisingly. Some 46% of pupils in years 10 to 11 reported mobile phones being used when they should not have been during “most or all” lessons. That is nearly half of pupils in most or all lessons reporting disruption, so the problem is absolutely there in the DFE’s data.

The idea that guidance has done the trick and that there is no longer a problem to solve is contradicted by the Department’s evidence. Work by the company Teacher Tapp, also known as School Surveys, similarly finds very high levels of problems and no signs of progress. Instead of guidance, all schools should be mandated and funded to have lockers and pouches, and to get kids to put smartphones away for the whole day, including breaks. Schools should be the beachhead and the first place that we re-create a smartphone-free childhood—seven hours in which we de-normalise being on the phone all the time for young people.

Why do we need a full ban, and not just guidance? I already gave some of the data showing that the guidance has not worked, but there are two other reasons. First, we need to support schools and have their back. From speaking to teachers and school leaders, I know that the pressures from parents to allow phones can be really severe on schools. Some parents, unfortunately, can be unreasonably determined that they must be able to contact their child directly at any minute, even though they are perfectly safe in schools. In the sorts of places where three and four-year-olds have smartphones, that is, I am afraid, normalised now, so a national ban would make things simpler and take the heat off schools.

Secondly, a full and total ban is needed as part of a wider resetting of social norms, as the hon. Member for North Herefordshire said, about children and smartphones. Smartphones and social media are doing damage to education even when they are not being used in schools. Our new clause 48 aims to be proportionate, and subsection (2)(b) would allow for exceptions as appropriate, having learned the lessons of what has been done in other countries.

To come to the hon. Lady’s wider point, when I was a Health Minister, I wanted us to get going an equivalent of the famous five bits of fruit and veg a day for this field—other Members might remember “Don’t Die of Ignorance” or “Clunk Click Every Trip”. We need some big things to reset the culture and wake up a lot of people, who are not necessarily going to read Jonathan Haidt’s book, to dangers that they may be unaware of. The heavy exposure of our kids to addictive-by-design products of the tech industry is the smoking of our generation. As with smoking, the tech industry comes up with fake solutions that do not actually make things safe. In the 1950s, it was filters on cigarettes, and now it is the supposed parental filters on social media. Just like with smoking, there is unfortunately a powerful social gradient to unmonitored internet access, with the worst effects on the poorest.

I do not know what Ministers will do about our new clause this time round, and I do not know what they will do as the Bill goes through the other place, but I hope that they will end up implementing this idea at some point. I will take my hat off to them when they do.

I come at this new clause first and foremost as a parent before I look at it as an MP. Looking at it with both hats on, though, I have long supported the previous Government’s guidance to schools to try to ban mobile phones during the school day. For a long time, I have needed convincing that a legislative ban was required, but I have finally concluded that we probably need to move towards one, partly for the reasons that the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston outlined. Some heads and school staff come under a lot of pressure from parents to allow the use of phones during the school day, but if this were a statutory requirement, the Government would have to provide the support needed to implement it.

Just this week, I talked to the headteacher of a secondary school in my constituency. He is very keen to implement a ban on phones during the school day, and he is trying, but kids are getting their phones out at various times and not staying off them. It is a fairly new school, but for some reason it was built without lockers, so there are no lockers. He has looked into purchasing lockers or Yondr pouches—the phone pouches that I believe the Irish Government have bought wholesale for every school in Ireland—and he said that that would cost him about £20,000, which he did not have in his budget. Putting the ban into statute would give headteachers and teaching staff the clout they need with parents who particularly want their children to have their phones during the school day, and the Government would need to resource the ban so that schools could implement it.

I draw Members’ attention to subsection (2) of the new clause, which deals with exemptions, because that is a very important point. Proper exemptions are important for young carers or children with health conditions that need monitoring via apps. School leaders and teachers know their children best, and they know which children need exemptions. I would be interested to know what the consequences would look like—would they fall on the school? I do not think the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston touched on that, but I would be interested in discussing another time how he thinks this ban could be enforced. It is just one of a suite of measures that we as policymakers need to take now, given the harm that phones and access to social media are undoubtedly doing to our children and young people.

I have some sympathy with the point that the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston has made about the addictive quality of screen time. I also draw attention to the fact that the addictive nature of screen time is obviously a result of technology, but it is also due to a lack of competition from other uses of a child’s time.

As such, it still staggers me that the first debate in eight years on playgrounds took place only because I secured it. The Conservative Government did not call a debate on playgrounds in their 14 years in government, and the only strategy ever on national play was launched by Ed Balls and Andy Burnham in 2008, with £230 million made available. Several years later, the coalition Government drew a red line through that strategy. We have also seen a hollowing out of children’s centres and Sure Start centres—really, of the whole fabric of what a child’s early developmental years could be. The places where parents could get support—not just to be parents alongside each other, but to raise their children and help them to develop—have all been hacked away. We need to look at children’s wellbeing in that context.

I have reservations about the hon. Member’s proposal, partly because I think we need a clearer distinction between a mobile telephone and a smartphone. As somebody who was born in the 1980s and grew up in the 1990s, I see mobile telephones as typically restricted to SMS—I think that is what the kids call it these days—voice calls and maybe an alarm. A smartphone is something far more advanced, which has destructive social media, addictive apps, games and the like. Greater clarity about the distinction between mobile phones and smartphones might be helpful as we navigate this debate.

It was interesting to hear the Conservative spokesperson call for collective action. I am always a fan of that, and I encourage him to continue down that path. I am happy to have a cup of coffee with him as we discuss it.

This new clause is interesting in the context of the many Bill Committee sittings in which Conservative Members have accused the Labour Government of using a centralising hand. Rather than sticking with the previous Conservative Government’s guidance to schools, the new clause proposes a ban. The approach feels much more centralising, with far less trust placed in teachers and headteachers, than we might expect based on the last few weeks of discussion.

I anticipated that the hon. Member would say something of the sort. His argument is perfectly reasonable, and I tried to answer that exact point in my speech. We think that aspects of the Bill are too micro-managing, but we want central Government to take the heat for schools on this issue. That is both to make it easier for schools and, as the hon. Member for Twickenham said, because there should be a proper plan to roll this out at scale, as is happening in other countries in Europe.

I understood the point that the hon. Member made in his speech, and I understand his clarification. I still struggle to see how the new clause fits in with what I regard as the Conservative party’s ideology around schooling and children’s wellbeing. It feels anomalous to ask headteachers and teachers to work within a ban, rather than trusting them to use the flexibility that the previous Government gave them.

One highlight of the Committee’s debate over the last few weeks has been the recognition that our teachers and headteachers know their students best. It is important that we give them all the trust and support that they deserve. I sympathise with what the hon. Member says about addictive apps, but for me it is not about banning, per se; it is about creating a viable and better alternative that gives children and teenagers much better things to do with their time.

I rise to speak in favour of the new clause. Unusually, I will start by saying what the new clause will not do, and the limits of the change it proposes.

The truth is that the vast majority of online harm does not happen at school. Banning phones or social media in school will not necessarily reduce the total amount of time that children spend online or address schools’ worries about kids being online, such as the concern about the increasing number of children who turn up to school having not slept sufficiently to be ready for the day. Nor does the new clause address the wider problems—not day to day, but more chronic—with attention span and eyesight. We have recently heard a lot about the greater prevalence of myopia.

Rules in this area are still important, however, and behaviour in school is crucial for teacher recruitment and, particularly, retention. Three big things have changed in schools in the last few years. The first is an attitudinal shift that came about around the time of covid, and that it will take us some years to understand. The other two are vapes and phones. It cannot be overstated how much those three things affect what happens in a school, the feel of the school and what teachers and headteachers report back.

The first thing that schoolchildren need for learning is to be able to concentrate. There is good reason to believe that even when a child is not using a phone, the fact that it is in their pocket—that it could buzz, vibrate or whatever at any point—can distract them. I think it is an important principle that the entire school day, including break time and lunch time, should be reserved for what school is about: learning, developing and being with friends. The question, as always, is whether we leave that to individual schools or have a national rule, and the hon. Member for Bournemouth East was right to speak about the tension between the two. I confess that that is a question I have personally had to grapple with on more than one occasion, and there is not a single, simple answer.

In the Bill, there are many national rules for things that arguably do not need a national rule, and that could be left to individual schools so that they can do what is best for their school community—from the precise number of school uniform items to the exact length of breakfast. The hon. Member is right that the Labour instinct is to say, “Let’s have a national rule on everything; we like consistency.” There is nothing wrong with consistency. He is also right that our instinct is to say, “Leave those rules to the schools wherever possible.” There are, however, times when an overriding national rule is beneficial and makes sense.

In 2019, when I was at the Department for Education, this question came up for me. At the time, we decided not to put a national rule in place. Politicians are always expected to have a firm and clear view on everything, and Ministers are expected to be absolutely certain about every decision they make, but it does not always work like that. Things can often be argued both ways. I was never 100% sure at the time that I was doing the right thing, but I thought I was. In 2024, we introduced non-statutory guidance on how the use of mobile phones should be prohibited throughout the school day, which, crucially, included breaks. We were also clear that there was the option to make the guidance statutory if necessary.

The world has continued to change since then. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Minister described, when it comes to mobile phone use and our worries about children, that change has not made things slightly less bad than they were before. Worries have only deepened and intensified.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

If the hon. Member has counter-examples, let us hear them.

That is not the point on which I am intervening. I was going to say that by using the language of mobile phone and smartphone interchangeably, we are confusing the debate. If our debate is confused, I am not sure how we can arrive at a certain policy.

I called for agreement with the Government around national rules. I want to clarify that I did not mean on everything, but only on the things in the Bill that I think need national rules. I agree with the right hon. Member that that is what provides consistency.

The hon. Member is right about the difficulty with defining the term smartphone. People talk about a brick phone, a feature phone, a basic phone, a Nokia, a smartphone and an iPhone, but the truth is that there is no definition; smartphone is just a term. It originally came about when people did not want to use the brand name iPhone, because Samsung phones and other types of phone were available. It just means a smarter phone; it has more stuff on it. Some of the things that people worry about are not necessarily only available on smartphones. I looked recently at iMessage, and it is starting to look more like WhatsApp. Anything that can be used for a group chat has some of the issues that we find in schools that cover the teenage and sub-teenage years.

There are other things that people can get on a smartphone but not on a Nokia that are perfectly benign. Some parents are quite keen for their kids to be able to look at the weather. Some are keen to be able to use the tracking device to follow their child, or for their child to be able to use the mapping device to find their way home, so I agree with the hon. Member.

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

This is in danger of turning into a much longer speech than I anticipated.

It is good to have this point of clarification. The clause uses the rather quaint phrase “mobile telephones” to capture everything, because the distinction between these devices is blurred. Among those who are interested in the smartphone issue, there is a separate debate about the use of dumbphones for things like walking to and from school, but there is no reason why even a dumbphone cannot cause massive distraction if it is out in class. A child could be texting somebody, for example, and, as my right hon. Friend pointed out, the distinction between these things is blurred these days. That is why we have this catch-all term. It is clear, and it is possible to legislate on that basis, notwithstanding our other discussions outside the scope of this debate.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the shadow Minister for refocusing what I was saying, and he is absolutely right. Some of our worries in relation to children apply regardless of the piece of technology. Anything that demands our attention and is ever-present brings such risks.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way? I promise that this will be my last intervention.

On that promise, I will give way.

I want to labour this point, as it were, because I understand entirely the point that the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston made. It is important to do so, because there are parents and children who wish to retain the option of being in contact with each other for safeguarding or wellbeing reasons. Such parents typically draw the distinction between a mobile phone, which allows for SMS and voice calls; and a smartphone, which typically has addictive social media or games, or particular apps that might cause wider safeguarding concerns. That is why I am trying to draw the right hon. Gentleman into focusing on mobile phones—brick phones, Nokia phones or the ones that Snake can be played on—as opposed to more sophisticated phones.

I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman says. I had my most recent constituency session with parents on the matter last Friday, and with some things, there is a bit of a grey area. Lots of parents say, “I don’t really mind so much about this”, but others do mind. With tracking technology, for example, some parents say that they really do not like being able to know where their child is. There is some variance, but the one imperative that is common to almost every parent is, “I want my child to be able to call me if they are in trouble, and I want to be able to call them on the way to and from school.” Parents want to hear from children if a club has been cancelled and they will be coming home at a different time, or if they are worried, or whatever it is. It is possible to do that on essentially any phone on the market, from the highest iPhone—I do not know what number they are up to these days—down to the most basic sub-Nokia brick phone.

There are other questions about functionality, and about what social media is. The Australians are having a bit of a debate about that at the moment, because to ban social media, they have to know what they are trying to ban. However, to address directly the point that the hon. Member for Bournemouth East made, much of this discussion relates to all manner of electronica that a child might have in their pocket or bag.

Are we not getting a bit distracted? The new clause is about banning things from the start of the first lesson to the end of the last, not on the way to or from school when children might want to call their parents.

The hon. Lady is quite right. I was only going to speak about this for three minutes or so, but the hon. Gentleman tempted me into other areas. On the promise that he was making one last intervention, I indulged him, and I am grateful to him.

In an earlier intervention on the Minister for School Standards, I mentioned the NHS mental health of children and young people survey, which shows us what has happened over time to children’s mental health. There is an inflection point and it comes, contrary to what most people believe, before the covid pandemic. That is the first critical data point to understand.

The second critical data point is that when we look beyond that study at other countries’ studies, we see that none of them are perfectly comparable, but studies in countries such as Germany, France and the United States follow basically the same pattern. There is an increase in the prevalence of mental ill health conditions in all the published data that I have seen for other countries. Whatever people say about domestic politics, whichever party was in Government here and whatever they did, that cannot explain what happens in France or the United States. The fact is that there is a global trend, or at least a trend in the western world, of an increasing prevalence of mental ill health conditions among children.

Will the right hon. Member assist me in identifying where the new clause makes it clear that it is only in relation to children, as opposed to anyone in our schools?

Can the hon. Member please explain what she means?

“Are you going to ban teachers from carrying phones?”, I think is what she means.

I am grateful—

Order. Can we not have this back and forth across the Committee?

We can have the classic, “Oh, the wording is technically flawed” argument—which to be fair to the Government, they have not deployed in this Bill Committee yet. We hope the amendment will be subsumed into the Bill, but the Government would never say, “Oh, we’ll just take that amendment and put it in.” Whoever is in Government never says that; they say, “Right, we accept this point. Now we’ll work on the detailed wording”.

To answer the question that the hon. Member for Derby North asked directly, subsection (2)(b) says the policy

“is to be implemented as the relevant school leader considers appropriate.”

I think this is—

rose—

You cannot intervene on an intervention.

Order. There is only one speaker at a time and there can be one intervention—I also say to the right hon. Member that there is only one Chair, so let us get it right.

I am very grateful—

rose—

Go on.

Does the right hon. Member agree that when we are looking at proposed new clauses in Committee, it is absolutely fundamental that what is written is capable of making meaningful legislation?

Yes, of course; we are legislating, and that is the case. It is also the case that, in my experience in Committee, the Government side never just accept an amendment put forward by the Opposition or another opposition party—or indeed by their own Back Benchers. If that has ever happened in modern history, it has yet to come across my bows. What we do is we debate what we are trying to do. If the new clause—which was drafted with expert help from the House of Commons—was accepted by the Government, as I very much hope it will be, they would without doubt say, “Oh, well, you need to change this, that and the other, and we’d do it slightly differently.” They would then bring forward their own Government new clause, and we would then vote on that on Report. We can have an elongated discussion about this, but I would rather just get to the end of what I was going to say about banning mobile phones in schools, and then—I believe I am right in saying—the hon. Lady may also speak. That is probably the easiest way to do it.

The increasing mental ill health of children and young people should be a matter of very serious concern for all of us. We should remember that it is something that is mirrored in other countries as well. Now, it is entirely scientifically invalid to infer from a correlation of two things—the increasing prevalence of social media and electronica, and the increasing prevalence of mental ill health—that one caused the other. Even if we cannot find any other potential cause that would have affected all those countries in the same way over the same timeframe, it is still scientifically invalid to directly infer causality. Logic has its limits, and I know a few people who seriously contest the idea that the spread and use of, and the very high amounts of time devoted to, mobile phones and social media has been a significant causal factor in that.

There are lots of different ways that one might address that and there are lots of things going on. The Online Safety Act 2023 was a landmark piece of legislation, and how it now gets implemented by Ofcom is very important. There is also the private Member’s Bill from Josh MacAlister—I think he became a Parliamentary Private Secretary overnight, so we hope there is still a good future for that private Member’s Bill. That is one part of what is going on. I also mentioned Australia, where there is a ban of some type to come in.

The school phones ban also plays a part. To be clear, it is not a ban on children carrying a mobile phone of any sort, brand or functionality to and from home and school. Nor does it preclude children who need to use a phone because of special educational needs, medical conditions, monitoring requirements or some other reasons from carrying one. Those things can be determined locally by the school. It is not a panacea—far from it—but it will make a difference in schools.

It is often said that mobile phones are already banned in the vast majority of schools, so a ban is not needed and will not have any effect. That is true to an extent. There are virtually no schools without policy. Clearly no one is allowed to whip out a phone and make a call in the middle of a maths lesson—in fact, we never actually see teenagers use a phone to make a call—and there are going to be some rules to some extent. In the Internet Matters survey, 43% of schools reported having an “out of sight” policy. It is true that lots of schools allow phone use in breaks and at lunch—I know that because I visited a lot of schools where kids had been using their phones in breaks and at lunch.

There is sometimes a bit of a hierarchy in how people assess these bans. One gets a slightly different assessment of the situation from Ministers, headteachers, classroom teachers and kids. According to the Youth Endowment Fund survey, which is huge—I think it surveys 7,500 13 to 17-year-olds—53% of children said they used mobile phones in break times, and one in six said they used their phone in lessons.

Having a national policy does not solve everything—kids still break rules sometimes—but it does make it easier for everyone. As I say, it does not preclude carrying a phone to and from school, and it does not preclude children with whatever additional needs from carrying them, but it supports leaders and teachers in what they are doing. It also makes it clear to parents that they cannot contact children during the school day—they can, but they do so through the school office, just as would have been the case in the old days. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston said, a national policy would set a firm norm.

More widely, the Government will have to return again and again to all the issues around online safety, social media use and the use of electronics, and they must study the mental health aspects in more detail. However, I suggest that, pending proof—the smoking example speaks to this—it is necessary to take a precautionary approach. When we put things in the hands of children, we tend not to say, “Let’s wait to see if it’s dangerous”; we test them first to make sure they are safe. I hope also that the Minister can speak with colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care about the provision of more NHS guidance on safe and reasonable levels of mobile phone use for children’s early brain development.

I have gone on a long time, and much longer than I anticipated. I will stop there.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments.

We have spent a great deal of time in Committee hearing from Opposition Members about autonomy: headteachers’ autonomy, school autonomy, and school leaders knowing exactly what is best for their pupils and communities. Subsection (2)(b) of the new clause states that the policy

“is to be implemented as the relevant school leader considers appropriate”,

but that means that the school leader could choose not to ban mobile phones for anybody in their school; there are exemptions, and they could decide that that is what they need. But that was not what I was going to talk about.

The use of mobile phones in schools should be decided at school level. It should reflect school values, processes and procedures, and not be decided in a directive or legislation from Government. Deciding it at school level would allow for the reasonable use of phones and technology, and it would allow for a balanced approach to technology. It could involve the school community in a discussion about what the phones and technology are being used for—a simple ban would not do that—and could include conversations about digital wellness and promoting healthier relationships, both offline and online, and a healthy approach to using technology at school, in the workplace and in the wider world. If we banned kids from using phones in school, we probably should ban people in their offices and in meetings from using them, because they do not pay attention either. Given how often we look up and see people not even bothering, how on earth can children learn while using mobile phones and technology in a measured and supportive way?

I want to draw the Committee’s attention to the Birmingham study from February, which was mentioned previously. It found that banning smartphones in schools did not directly improve student academic performance or mental health. However, that research indicated that excessive phone use correlates with negative outcomes, yet there were no significant differences between the kids who had bans in their school and those who did not. It is about the wider picture, which has been talked about. I also draw the Committee’s attention to a survey conducted in November 2024 of over 1,000 teachers. One in five believed that a school-wide ban would not improve the relationships and attainment levels of children, and 41% agreed that they used smartphones as a teaching tool within their classrooms.

The hon. Lady talks about the use of pupils’ own smartphones as a teaching tool in class. Does she have any worries about the equity of that? What happens to the kids who do not have smartphones in those situations?

That is a good point. Although we have to resource our schools properly to ensure appropriate iPads and computers that can be used, we would not want the situation the hon. Member described to continue either. We must ensure that schools are resourced.

We have talked about disruption in classrooms, and 20% of teachers said that the unauthorised use of mobile phones was one of the main causes. However, chatter and not sitting still accounted for 80% and 75% respectively, and disrespect to other pupils was much higher than the use of mobile phones. When asked whether a whole-school ban would improve learning, 18% felt that it would, but actually 57% felt that a class size reduction would improve behaviour much more. We need to give our schools the autonomy to have that conversation with their communities and to involve their students. We have student councils and we have parent groups, and we must involve them in the conversations on mobile phone use in schools so that we can teach digital wellness now and for the future.

Call me a lawyer—that increasingly seems to be a term of abuse in this place—but I want to be clear that voting for this new clause would be voting to enable the banning of adults, including staff, parents and visitors, from using and carrying mobile phones in schools. I thought that scrutinising line by line was literally our job in this Committee.

New clause 48 would prohibit the use and carrying of certain devices during the school day. I thank the shadow Minister and my hon. Friends the Members for Bournemouth East, for Portsmouth North and for Derby North for their contributions, as well as the hon. Member for Twickenham and the right hon. Member for East Hampshire. I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which Members have contributed to the debate on the new clause.

We recognise the negative impact that mobile phones can have on children’s learning. Every pupil deserves to learn in a safe, calm classroom, and we will always support our hard-working and dedicated teachers to make that happen. That is why the Government’s “Mobile phones in schools” guidance is already clear that schools should prohibit the use of mobile phones throughout the school day, including during lessons, the time between lessons, break times and lunch time. It is for school leaders to develop and implement a policy, while ensuring that they adhere to the public sector equality duty and the Equality Act 2010.

New clause 48 lacks the flexibility required to accommodate some individual needs, such as a mobile phone as an adaptation for a disabled child. We know that schools are already prohibiting the use of mobile phones, including through outright bans. Even before guidance was published, around 97% of all schools in England had policies restricting mobile phone use in some way. There are a range of ways in which a mobile phone-free school can be achieved. We trust headteachers to develop a mobile phone policy that works for their own schools and for the school community.

More broadly, given the points made by a number of Members, I stress that everyone—including parents, schools and providers—is responsible for ensuring that children are aware of the importance of internet safety. With the use of mobile phones already subject to restrictions in most schools, it is outside of school that children are using those devices and spending time online. That is why we want to encourage schools to consult with and build support from parents to develop a policy that works in context and keeps children and young people safe.

Moreover, we can do more to protect children and young people from risk of harm online and on social media when they walk out of the school gates. We have been clear as a Government that our priority is the effective implementation of the Online Safety Act, so that children can benefit from its wide-ranging protections as soon as possible—and be able to safely benefit from technological advances for years to come. I therefore recommend that the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston withdraw the new clause.

We have had an important and interesting debate, and we have heard a mix of arguments—some better than others, I think. The argument about drafting does not hold water. Subsection (2)(a) talks about students, subsection (4) talks about pupils, and subsection (2)(b) would allow a policy to be implemented in a sensible way. If Members do not agree with the new clause, they can just say so, rather than find lawyerly arguments against it.

However, there were some good points made. More than one thing can be a problem at a time, and this new clause is not the silver bullet. There are lots of problems with smartphone use outside of schools, as well as other things on top of that that we need to do. That is why I talked about this as a beachhead—as the first thing we should do. It is interesting that all over the world things are changing. In the US, the overwhelming majority of states either already have a ban or are on their way legislatively to getting one. The US is ground zero for a lot of these problems, and it is interesting that it is moving to take decisive action. I think we will, too.

For Ministers, there will always be a load of people who want to come to them and say that, “It’s all very complicated—I have been working with the industry,” “It’s correlation not causation,” or, “We should just let be.” There are things in the Bill where the Opposition have been critical of the Government for being more directive than we think is appropriate for the subject. On this issue, however, we think the subject is so important. In this House, we now all talk constantly about the mental health crisis among young people—it is such a big thing. It seems to be pretty incontrovertible that one of the main causes of that is the rise of the smartphone-based childhood. This provision could be an important first step towards tackling that massive national crisis.

I hope that at some point Ministers will think again about the provision when they have more time to reflect. The guidance on its own is not working; we can see from the data that it is not changing things enough. That is why I will press the new clause to a Division.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

The Committee divided: Ayes 6, Noes 10.

Question accordingly negatived.